Bastard's Blood
by JakeCrown
Summary: If Gary Jennings wrote Game of Thrones... We follow the loves and adventures of Jon, A young boy, growing up in a world. A tale of life in Westeros with the cruel morality, religious fervour, ageless greed, and exotic brutalities of 17th century Mexico.
1. Chapter 1

I am drawing heavily upon the writings Gary Jennings to illustrate this world in in the magnificence it deserves. If heaven exists, Gary Jennings has most assuredly earned a spot next to God himself. RIP

To His Most Excellency, Sir Loras Tyrell, Holy Knight-  
Lord of The Rainbow Guard, Warden of the North by  
Appointment of His Most Blessed Majesty Tommen  
Baratheon, Our Lord King.

As Captain of the Guard for Your Most Excellency's prison, it has been my duty to examine one Jon, known to all as Jon the Bastard. A notorious bandit, seducer of women and leader of rabble.

As Your Most Excellency knows, this criminal is of tainted blood. Specifically that category of mixed blood the law defines as bastard. As a bastard, he is outside the protection of the Seven and there are no legal prohibitions against either his torture or execution.

The examination of this thief and murderer of uncertain ancestry and tainted blood has been neither pleasant nor profitable. Your instructions to me are to pry from his lips the location of his comrades and the location of the great hoard of treasure acquired by insult to His Majesty and to you and other citizens of The Seven Kingdoms, the rightful owners thereof.

You also commissioned me to obtain to location of the northern whore who is said to be his mother. The woman has publicly denied birthing the bastard, but, whether that is the truth or she has contrived such a story because of his tainted blood will not be answered until we find her and give her a taste of the truth-extractors we have in this dungeon prison.

I confess, Most Excellency the task you have given me is more difficult and odious than could be imagined. It is most repugnant to question this half-caste son of a whore, as if he were a legal person, rather than simply hanging him. However, the dead tell no tales and despite my ardent wish I am forced to simply seek the information by torture rather than than dispatching him to the old gods, his masters.

We began the interrogation with the cord and water method. We placed knotted cords around the prisoner's limbs and twist them with a rod. Five twists are generally sufficient to elicit the truth, but, it did nothing to this madman except excite laughter. We then increased the twists and wet the cords to create shrinkage, but, no words of confession spilled from his mouth. We could not use the cords on his head in fear it would pop out his eyes and prevent him from leading us to the treasure.

The water and cord method works well on shopkeepers and women, but it is not the equal of this bastard. We were forced to try other, more creative, methods with the tools we have available. I began loosening the prisoner's tongue with a skinning cat. The hemp cords are soaked in a solution of salt and embedded with sharp, small pieces of iron. It can reduce the skin and flesh to pulp in a short time. Most men would confess and beg for mercy after a small taste of this venomous tail. The lashing of this tree worshiper opened only a flood of the most treasonous and blasphemous of statements from his foul mouth.

Continuing the extraction, the prisoner was hoisted upside-down, hanging from his left foot with his hands bound behind his back and mouth gagged. While in this position, water was poured down his nose. When these further methods failed to assist his powers of recollection or stem the flow of foul utterances, his fingers were put in thumb screws.

The thumbscrew is a favored device of persuasion because it exerts tremendous agony with little effort. The thumb and fingers are put into a screw device between two crossbars with ribs, and the bars are slowly screwed down This is done until the screws tightened and blood squirted from his thumbs and fingers. This too failed to elicit the truth from the treasonous bastard.

My jailer swept up the vermin from the floor of the dungeon and spread them over the prisoner's body. The prisoner was kept tied up so he could not scratch or brush them off. I am pleased to report that I have never heard more pleasant music than his screams as the vermin crawled over his naked body and squirmed into his open wounds.

All of this was performed on the first day. I regret, Your Most Excellency, that no confession spilled from his lips. After those methods failed, we continued the most severe of persuasions for seven days yet the bastard has disclosed neither the location of the treasure nor the whereabouts of the bitch from whose loins this bastard dropped.

Because this bastard has neither recanted his evils nor revealed the hiding place of his comrades and stolen booty, It is my recommendation that the prisoner be transferred to the Office of His Holiness, The Most High Sparrow to answer for his blasphemies and further interrogation and repentance before he is executed.

While I await Your Most Excellency's instructions, I have given the prisoner quill and paper at his request. Can Your Excellency appreciate my astonishment when the bastard made the claim to be able to read and write like a true-born person? I confess my surprise was even greater after I had him compose a sentence and found that he indeed placed written words on paper like a Maester.

Teaching a bastard to read and write is of course, offensive to Your Most Excellency's policy of providing a lifestyle for bastards commensurate to their station in life as servants and laborers.

However, because you believe that he may inadvertently provide a clue as to the location of the treasure he has hoarded, I have given him quill and paper to record his babbling. As you have instructed, the writings of this madman, no matter how absurd, will be sent to Your Most Excellency for examination.

The Seven bear witness to the truth of this testament to Your Most Excellency, Warden of the North.

Domeric Bolton,  
Captain of the Guard.

666 666 666

Men call me Jon the Bastard.

I truth, I was not named bastard. It is an accusation that the bearer was conceived outside of holy matrimony. Even less flattering words have been used to describe my person. The rape and union of men and women has created a great many bastards who fall to begging and thievery. Rejected by the people of the mother and the father, there is little choice.

I am one of these, yet, I admit to my arrogant pride in having the blood of two noble families in my veins. Of my name, true and otherwise, and other treasures, I will say more later. Like the Eastern Princess who wove tales to keep her head on her shoulders, I will not cast all my pearls in a single toss...

"Bastard, tell us of jewels. Of silver and gold." The words of the gaoler come to mind like hot embers from the torturer's pyre for the not-yet-dead.

I will speak, but first, there is the matter of my birth. My youth. Dangers surmounted and a love that conquers all. These things must not be hurried, but savored. Patience is a virtue I learned as a guest in the Warden's dungeon.

One does not hurry a torturer.

Despite the corporal damage, my soul is stalwart. It will still bethink the truth, which is all that remains to me. All else has been taken from me. So here I sit, naked before the Old Gods and the rats that share my cell.

Truth still resides in my heart, in that sanctum sanctorum that no man can touch. The truth cannot be stolen from a man, even on the rack, because it is in the custody of the gods.

I was destined from birth to play a role that made me different from other men. Secrets have always been shadows in my life. I was to find, even my birth was veiled by dark thoughts and foul deeds.

Tell the gaoler to put away his hot pincers and await this tale of treasure for I am not yet prepared to tell it. His embrace has left my thoughts in many pieces, and I must mend them to remember this jewel of life and those worldly treasures the Lord desires word of.

I must go back. Back to the days when I was suckled by a she-wolf and drank the wine of my youth.

I shall start from the beginning my friends and share with you the gold of my life.

Call me Jon.

My first memories were in the village of Seasill in the shadow of the Red Mountains of Dorne. The First Men built temples in the mountains to please the sun, moon, and, rain gods, but after the old gods were defeated by the Andals and their Seven, the land and the people upon it were divided into estates owned by Andal nobility.

Composed of a few hundred hundred red, mud and straw bricked huts, The village of Seasill and all it's people belonged to the estate of Sir Franco Peres, Knight of Seasill.

The small stone sept was was near the riverbank on the village side. On the other side of the river were the shops, corrals, and the great house of the estate. The great house was built like a fortress with a high, thick wall, arrow slits, and a huge door with braces. A banner blazoned the wall next to the door.

In old times, it is said the sun never set upon the Valyrian Freehold. It dominated not just it's doomed homeland, but stretched around the world. The lands of Essos were taken, nearly in entirety. The lands along the river Rhoyne were home to the people known as the Rhoynar.

The Lord of Seasill and his family were of Valyrian blood. This earned the not-so-secret ire of his small-folk.

It is said their cities were burned in dragon-fire. Their gods destroyed and forgotten. Their lands and riches stolen by the white haired demons. The survivors crossed the sea to escape the wrathful and greedy dragon-lords. Lead by a fierce Warrior Queen, they made land in Dorne.

Upon landing, it is said they found more white haired demons. Angered and hungry they slaughtered the dragon-less white haired people. They hunted them from one side of Dorne to the other. Settling into the Red Mountains, these people became known as the Stony Dornish, while the Rhoynar became simply Dornish.

I grew up speaking both the Andal and Dornish tongues.

Septon Antony's sept where once there sat a shrine to the Rhoynar goddess of fertility. After the Andal gods defeated the Rhoynar gods, the shrine was torn down and the stones used to build a sept. From then on the villagers gave praise to the Seven instead of the gods of their homeland.

The village of Seasill was a small kingdom in and of itself. The Dornish who worked the land grew wheat, squash, beans, and other food stuff, horses, cattle, sheep, and swine. Workshops created almost everything used on the estate, from shoes for horses and plows for tilling the soil, to the rough carts with wooden wheels used to haul the harvest. Only the fine furnishings, china and linens of the great house used by the lord, Sir Franco, came from outside the estate.

I shared the hut of my mother, Miaha. She was the first mother I knew. It was common knowledge that Sir Franco lay with Miaha, and everyone believed I was his son. Sir Franco bore the white hair and purple eyes with pale skin that marked a Valyrian. I also bore pale skin and purple eyes, while my hair was as black as my mother's.

The bastards dropped by peasant women after intercourse with nobility were favored by neither the nobility or the small-folk. To the knight, I was just an increase to his stock of dray animals. When Sir Franco looked at me, he saw not a child but a piece of property. The knight proffered no more affection towards me than he did to the cattle grazing in the fields.

Accepted by neither the lord or his people, even children spurned me as a playmate, I learned early that my hands and feet existed solely to defend my mixed blood and tainted birth. There was no sanctuary for me in the estate's great house. The knight's son Jose, was a year older than myself; his twin daughters, Maribel and Isibel, two years older. None of them were allowed to play with me, although they were allowed to beat me at will.

Privilege of nobility.

Lady Amelia was unrelentingly venomous. For her I was sin incarnate-living proof that her husband, the lord, had stuck his cock between the legs of a Dornish whore.

"WHAT IS THIS SECRET? TELL IT TO US!"

The gaoler's words appear on my paper like black ghosts.

Patience Sir Captain, patience. Soon you will know the secret of my birth and of other treasures. I will reveal the secrets in words the blind can see and the deaf can hear, but at present my mind is too weak from hunger and deprivation to do so. It will have to wait until I have regained my strength from some decent food and sweet water.

The day came when I saw with my own eyes how a person like me, who was without title and pedigree, was treated when they rebelled. I was more than halfway through my eleventh year when I came out of the hut I shared with my mother carrying my fishing spear when I heard horses and shouting.

"Move! Faster!"

Two men on horseback were driving a man before them with whips. Running and staggering, the horses breathing down his neck, their powerful hoofs hammering at his heels, the man came toward me down the village path.

The horsemen were Sir Franco's men-at-arms. Andals who protected the estate with sword and lance from bandits and used their whips to keep the Dornish working in the fields.

"Hurry up!"

Lighter of skin and taller than the average Rhoynar, dressed as a peasant, the man was a stranger to me. White hair stained with blood marked the man as of Valyrian descent.

A horseman rode up beside the stranger and squirted him savagely. The man staggered and fell, belly down. The back of his shirt was torn and bloody, his back a mass of bleeding whip marks. The other horseman charged with a lance and stabbed the tip into the cheek of his backside.

The man struggled to his feet and staggered down the village lane towards me. He lost his footing again and the the horsemen wheeled, resuming their attack with the lance and whip.

"Who is he?" I asked my mother as she came up beside me.

"A mine worker." She said. "An escapee from one of the northern silver mines in the Red Mountains. He came to one of the workers in the fields asking for food, and they called the men-at-arms. Mines pay a reward for runaways."

"Why are they beating him?"

It was a stupid question that required no answer from my mother. I might as well have asked why an oxen is whipped to pull a plow. Peasants were dray animals. Forbidden to leave the estates of their lords, they were property. When they strayed, they were whipped like any other animal that disobeys it;s master.

The King's law actually protected small-folk from being put to death, but no law exists to forbid beating.

As the man got closer I noticed that the man's face was marred by more than blood.

"His face is branded." I said.

"Mine owners brand their workers." Miaha said. "When they are traded or sold to other mines, more brands are burned on. This man was branded by many masters."

I had heard of this practice from the Septon. He explained that when the Kings of old gave the lords their original lands, they were granted tribute paying serfs. At one time, many lords branded their initials onto the foreheads of subjects to keep them from straying. The Prince had forbade the practice hundreds of years ago and it came only to be used for the forced laborers and criminals who work in the dreaded silver mines of the mountains.

From the Rhoynar who came out of their huts, I heard the word "Valyrian" hissed as an insult. The insult was intended for me as much the mine slave. When I looked toward the group, one of the men caught my eye and spat on the ground.

"Fool!" My mother said angrily.

The man melted into the group to avoid my mother's ire. While the villagers may have viewed my tainted blood with repugnance, my mother was pure Rhoynar. Of more importance, they did not want to antagonize her because it was known that Sir Franco slept with her from time to time. My own position as the supposed bastard of the knight granted me nothing. There was no blood tie from me to him that was recognized by him or anyone else.

The villagers were strong believers in the purity of blood. I represented more than tainted blood to them, I was a living reminder of the loss of their gods, homeland, and the rape of their women. I was just a boy and it broke my heart to be surrounded with such contempt.

As the man was herded toward us, I got a closer look at the agony twisting his features. I once watched men in the village beat a crippled deer to death with clubs. I saw in the man's eyes the same feral anguish.

I don't know why his tormented eyes locked onto mine. Perhaps I was the only one whose face expressed shock and horror.

"I am also human!" He shouted at me.

He grabbed my fishing spear. I thought he was going to turn and fight the two horsemen with it. Instead he shoved the spear against his stomach and fell on it. Air and blood bubbled from his mouth and and the wound as he writhed in the dirt.

My mother pulled me aside as the men-at-arms dismounted. One of the men flogged the man, cursing him to the seven hells for cheating them out of a reward.

The other drew his sword and stood over the man.

"His head, we can still get something out of his head and branded face. The mine owner will post it on a stake as a warning to other runaways."

He chopped at the dying man's neck.

AN: Before the idiots go haywire, there are no doctors in the little villages of America, much less Africa. Why would the little villages of primitive Westeros be any different with Maesters who hold the chain-link for medicine?

Thus I grew from a baby crawling in the dirt to a young boy running in the dirt, neither brown skinned nor white, neither Valyrian nor Rhoynar, welcomed nowhere save the hut of my mother and the little stone sept of Father Antony.

My mother's hut also welcomed Sir Franco. He came each Saturday afternoon, while his wife and daughters visited the lady of a nearby estate. At those times I was sent away from the hut.

No village children played with me, so I explored the riverbanks, fishing and inventing playmates in my mind. Once, I returned to the hut to retrieve my forgotten fishing spear and heard strange noises coming from the draped off corner where my mother's sleeping pallet lay. I peeked through the reed curtain. What I saw caused me to flee the hut, frightened.

I spent most of my days with Father Antony. In truth, I found more love and affection from the septon than I did Miaha. While Miaha usually treated me with kindness, I never felt the warm, passionate bond between us that I saw with other children and mothers. Deep down I always felt that my mixed blood made her ashamed of me before her own people.

I once expressed this feeling to father, and he told me it was not my blood. "Miaha is proud to to be thought of as having the Sir's child. It is the woman's vanity that keeps her from showing her love. She looked into the river once, and saw her own reflection and fell in love with it." We both laughed over comparing her to the vain Narcissus of Valyrian legend. Some say he fell into the pool and drowned.

The septon taught me to read almost as soon as I was able to walk. Because most of the great classics were written in High and Low Valyrian, he taught me my letters in both languages. The lessons always came with repeated warnings: I was never to let anyone, Andal or Rhoynar, know that I had such learnings. The lessons were always conducted in the privacy of his room.

Father Antony was a saint about everything but my education. He was determined to shape me into a scholar despite my low birth. When my mind did not grasp quick enough, he threatened to quicken my mind with a whipping stick. In truth, he never had the heart to strike me.

Such learning was not only forbidden to a bastard; Nobles were seldom literate unless they were destined for the priesthood or Citadel. The septon said lady Amelia could barely write her name. The father, at his personal peril, had educated me "beyond my means," as he put it.

Through the father, I knew other worlds. While other boys followed their fathers to tend the fields as soon as they could walk, I sat in the father's small chamber at the back of the little sept and read Aegon's Odyssey and Viserys' Aeneid.

All must labor on the estate. Had I been anyone else, I would have joined the others in the fields. The septon though, chose me as his helper. My earliest memories were of sweeping the sept with a bound-twig broom, a full head taller than I, and dusting the father's small collection of leather-bound tomes and codices of Scripture, classics, ancient annals, and medicine.

Besides ministering to the souls of all on the estate, the septon was the chief source of medical advice. Andals from many miles came seeking his attention, "as poor and ignorant as it is," he said, rather truthfully. Rhoynar, of course, had there own shamans and witches to combat sickness. In our small village we had a witch-sorceress who could be called upon to put a curse on an enemy or drive off disease-inducing demons.

At an early age I began to accompany the septon as his servant on his medical missions to those who were too ill to come to the sept. At first I only cleaned up after him. Soon I was able to hand him instruments or medicines as he worked on patients. I watched him mix his elixirs and later was able to make the same concoctions. I learned to set broken bones, remove arrows, suture a wound, and restore the humors of the body through bloodletting, although always in the guise as a servant.

All these arts I mastered by the time I was sprouting hair under my arms. Sir Franco never took notice of my skills until I was almost twelve years old and made a mistake of revealing what I learned.

That incident was to set off a chain of events that changed my life. Like so many times, changes came to me not with the tranquility of a lazy river but with the fiery bursts of the mountains called volcanoes.

It occurred during the examination of a guest, who complained of abdominal pain. I had not seen this noble before but knew from others that he was the manager of the estate that was the largest along the river. It was owned by the Cerda family of Starfall, a place I had never seen.

One day, the septon had been called to the great house to administer to Sir Eduard Cerda, who had been visiting with Sir Franco when he became ill after the noon meal. I came with the septon as his servant, carrying the leather bag in which he stored his medical tools and main jars of potions.

The knight was laying on a cot when we arrived. He stared intently up at me as the father examined him. For some reason my features had attracted his curiosity. It was almost if, despite his pain, he recognized me. This was an unusual experience for me. Knights never noticed servants, especially bastards.

"Our guest," Sir Franco told Father Antony, "flinches when you press his stomach. He has strained a muscle in his abdomen, probably from lying on too many Dornish maidens."

"Never too many, Sir Franco," the patient said, "but perhaps too tough and too tight. Some of the village women are harder to mount than a lion."

From the smell of the man's breath as he passed by me earlier, I realized that his stomach was boiling from the hot peppers and spices he had consumed. The Andals had adopted Dornish cooking, but their stomachs were not always in agreement. He needed a potion of goat's milk and olive oil to clean out his innards.

"It's an ache in his stomach from the noon meal," I blurted out, "not a muscle."

I realized my mistake immediately by the flush of anger on Sir Franco's face. I had not only refuted his diagnosis but had insulted the food of his household, literally accusing him of poisoning his guest.

Father Antony froze with his mouth agape.

Sir Franco slapped he hard across the face. "Go outside and wait."

With my face stinging, I went outside and squatted in the dirt to await the inevitable beating.

In a few minutes, Sir Franco, Sir Eduard, and Father Antony came outside. They looked at me and appeared to argue among themselves in whispers. I could not hear the words, but I could tell that the visiting knight was making some contention about me. The assertion seemed to create puzzlement in Sir Franco and consternation in the septon.

I had never seen the father in fear before but today, apprehension twisted his features.

Finally, my lord motioned me over. I was tall for my age but thin.

"Look at me, boy," the visiting aristocrat said.

The man took my jaw in his hands and twisted my face from one side to another as if he were looking for some special mark.

"You see what I mean?" He said to the others, "the same nose, ears, eyes—look at the side profile."

"No," argued the septon, "I know the man as well, and the resemblance between him and the boy is superficial. I know of this thing. You must trust my word."

Whatever the contention the father was making, it was apparent from the Sir's expression that he was not trusting it.

"Go over there," Sir Franco said to me, indicating a corral post.

I went to it and squatted in the dirt while the three men had another animated conversation and kept looking back at me.

Finally, all three went back into the great house. Sir Franco returned a moment later with a rawhide rope and horsewhip. He lashed me to a posst and gave me the worst beating in my life.

"Never again are you to speak out in the presence of a noble unless you are told to. You forget your place. You are a peasant bastard. You must never forget that you have tainted blood and that those of your type are lazy and stupid. Your place in life is to serve people of honor and quality."

He stared at me intently and then twisted my face from side to side as the other man had done. He uttered a foul curse.

"I see the resemblance," he said, "the bitch laid with him."

Flinging me aside, he grabbed his whip and rushed across the stepping stones to the village on the other side of the river.

My mother's wails could be heard throughout the village. Later, when I returned to the hut, I found my mother huddled in a corner. There was blood on her face from her mouth and nose and one of her eyes was swelling shut.

"Bastard!" She yelled and struck me.

The next morning I was spit from the mouth of a volcano.

"We are leaving the village," Father Antony said. He awoke me in the hut I shared with my beaten mother. His features were pale and drawn, his eyes red from a lack of sleep. He was nervous and anxious.

"Have you been wrestling demons all night?" I asked

"Yes, and I lost. Throw your things in a sack; we are leaving now. A cart is being loaded with my possessions."

It took me a moment to comprehend that he did not just mean that we were going to a nearby village.

"We are leaving the village for good. Be prepared to leave in a few minutes."

"What of my mother?"

He paused at the doorway to the hut and stared at me as if he were puzzled at my question. "Your mother? You have no mother."


	2. Chapter 2

For a while we were homeless.

We wandered from sept to sept as Father Antony sought food, roof, and sanctuary for us. Still short of twelve, I understood little of the misfortune that had been inflicted upon us other than the blisters on my feet from walking and the hollowness in my stomach when there was not enough food to fill it.

From the conversations I overheard between the septon and his brethren in the septs, an accusation had been made by Sir Franco. He asserted that Father Antony had violated his faith, vows, and duties by impregnating a woman. Even at that age I was shocked to hear the the woman was Miaha, and I was said to be the child of that sin.

The Septon was not my father, of that I was certain, although I loved him like a father. My features were clearly Valyrian, which the septon was clearly not. Once when the septon was besotted with wine, a not uncommon condition, he swore my father was in the highest tier of lords. When the sweet nectar of the gods has captured his mind, the septon was prone to say many things.

He told me it was true that he had stuck his cock in Miaha, but that he had not fathered me. He further confounded the mystery of my birth in an enigma by saying Miaha had not birthed me.

Sober, he refused to confirm or deny his drunken ravings.

The poor septon. My friends, believe me when I say that this was a very good man. Eh, all right, he was not perfect. But do not cast stones. A few mortal sins, yes, but his sins hurt no one but himself.

On a day of great sadness for the father, he was avowed by the Arch-Septon of the Starry Sept. Those who take evil in their ears and spit them out their mouths had made many charges against him, few of which he bothered to defend, many for which he had no defense. I felt his sadness. His greatest sin was caring too much.

Although the Septary had rescinded his priestly authority to take confession and grant absolution, they couldn't stop him from ministering to the needs of the people. He finally found his calling in Oldtown.

A dirtier place, you would be hard pressed to find.

The foul miasma rose from it's poisonous waterways and sewers and floated over the city. Year after year, for centuries untold, the bloody flux comes and takes it's toll of citizens to meet the Stranger. The rotted air was the bane of travelers who came off the ships and hurried out the gates, clutching nosegays to their faces.

What would we do in a place like this? Have the poor man marry some rich widow who would permit us to live like kings in her home? No, never. My friend sucked in the troubles of others like the leeches barbers use to suck the bad blood out of people. It was not a fine house we went to, but a hovel with dirt floors.

To Antony, it was the 'House of the Poor.' To him it was as much a house of the gods as the the Sept of Baelor itself. It was a long, narrow, wood shack. The planks that made up its walls and roof were thin and rotted from long years of rain, heat, and wind. Sand and dust blew in and the whole place shook during a storm.

I slept on dirty straw next to whores and drunks and squatted near the fire twice a day to get a slice of brown bread with a spoon of beans. This simple meal was a fine feast for those who knew only the streets.

Every day, I was turned out onto the streets of one of the meanest cities in Westeros. Over the next couple of years blows and curses would recast me from being a rural boy into a street orphan, a beggar, a social leper. Lying, thieving, conniving, and begging were only a few of the talents I acquired.

I confess that I was not a saintly boy. I sang not hymns but a cry of the street—a cry for alms!

"Charity for a poor orphan of the gods!" was my song.

Often I covered myself with dirt, rolled back my eyes, and twisted my arms in obscene contortions, all but wrenching them out of their sockets, in order to extricate alms from fools. I was a mudlark with the voice of a mendicant, the soul of a thief, and the heart of a waterfront whore. I spent my days barefoot and dirty, keening my alms cry, cadging coppers from silken princes who, when they looked down on me at all, grimaced with contempt.

Do not cast stones at me like the Arch-septon did to my poor friend when he took the holy vows from him. The streets of Oldtown were a battlefield where you could find riches... or death.

After a couple of years, the dark cloud that had come over us at the estate disappeared. I was past my fourteenth birthday when the Stranger's shadow fell across our path again.

It was a day in which there was both death and riches on the streets.

I had writhed, contorted, and begged near the fountain in the center's of the city's main plaza; and though my alms remained empty, I was not particularly chagrined. Early that morning I had struggled through Maester Alighieri's great comedy, 'The Seven Hells'.

Eh, don't think I read this tome for pleasure. The father, though stripped of his vows, was still a father to me. He insisted I keep up my education. Because our library was so limited, I had read the same books over and over. I had memorized the 'Seven Pointed Star' from early childhood.

The tale's dark journey, guided by Maegor the Cruel through the descending seven hells, the infernos, to the Stranger at the bottom of the pit, were not unlike awakening I received when I was first cast out onto the streets of Oldtown. Whether I could be purged of the taint of my birth and enter paradise in the end or die and suffer the infernos were still unanswered questions.

The former septon had been loaned the epic poem by Father Gene, a young priest who had become his secret friend despite the fall from grace with the Septry. Father Gene had been made party to my secret education. That morning, after I recited the poem in my bumbling low-Valyrian, Father Antony had beamed and boasted of my prowess with knowledge.

Father Gene had agreed. "He drinks up knowledge like you drink up that fine wine I bring from the Sarry Sept." Father Gene had said.

Of course, my scholarship was a secret only known to the fathers and I. Here in the Reach, lettering a bastard was punishable by prison and the rack. Had our secret leaked out, we could have been the entertainment of the day.

For entertainment it was. This day, what seemed like half the city gathered in their finery- accompanied by small children, fine wines, and costly comestibles- to watch a flogging. Excited by the prospect of blood, they had a glow in their cheeks and malice in their eyes.

An overseer was was lining thirty bound and ragged prisoners up by sixes and loading them into caged, horse-drawn prison wagons. He had a dark beard, a dirty, low-slung felt hat, and mean eyes. He made promiscuous use of the curate-quirt, punctuating it's cracks with bloodcurldling oaths.

"Get in there, you miserable sons of dray beasts and whores. In there or you'll curse the mothers you never knew for giving you birth -you murdering, thieving, pimping bastards."

They lumbered painfully under his whip, with gritted teeth, into their portable prisons. His charges were were on their way to the silver mines of the red mountains. For the most part, they weren't "murdering, thieving, pimping bastards." Most were mere debtors, sold into peonage by their creditors. In the mines, they were to work off their obligation. At least that was the illusion. In plain fact, when food, clothing, housing, and transport compounded their debt, the bill burgeoned irretrievably.

For most, the mines were a death sentence.

The city magistrate -the Lord's commander of the city- periodically swept the streets, throwing out of work wretches into jail. From there, they were transported to the mines.

That could be me, I thought, with grim foreboding.

The magistrate peddles these unfortunates, lines his coffers, and, according to the Hightowers, reduces the city's infamous stink.

I stared at the poor souls, ill at ease. The ancient Andal king, Hugor of the Hill, had decreed slavery illegal. This decree may mean something to someone, somewhere. That place was not here. Thousands of peasants died in tunnels, smelters, and pits. This was nothing compared to those who died with knowing nothing but the fields of grain and whips of their lords. Many died in the workshops, spinning wool or dying fabric, chained to their workplaces.

The king could decree all he liked, but in the forests and mountains, where there were no laws, the ones with the swords held brutal sway.

The crowd cheered, and three guards dragged a thief to the flogging post for his mandatory one hundred lashes. Once he was gagged and strung up, the sergeant-of-the-guard paced off the requisite distance, the black snake cracked.

Blood bloomed. The thief's back was laid bare, his ribs and backbone shockingly white under the flayed flesh. Wine cups were raised, and the crowd thundered it's approbation. Despite the gag, his screams soared above the crowd's roar.

The whip rose and fell, rose and fell, and I averted my eyes.

At last, the hundredth lash was done.

"Lice," a man near me said. The voice noble, whose protruding belly and exquisite raiment bespoke of great wealth, rich food, and rare wine. His delicate wife, garbed in silk and shaded by a parasol held be a Summer Islander servant, was at his side.

"These street urchins breed like bed bug," she agreed, nodding her disdain. "If the Magistrate didn't sweep them from the gutter, we would trip over them every third step."

A second commotion drew my attention. A cocky young street boy pelted a foraging vulture with a rock, shattering it's right wing. A dozen urchins joined him, none older than nine or ten, tethering the crippled bird to a tree. Once secured, they whipped it with a stick.

A big, ugly, bastard of a bird- it was over two feet tall and five feet across, even with a broken wing- it had been drawn by the smell of the thief's blood. As had it's comrades, a dozen of whom spiralled above the plaza. As the crowd dispersed, they began a slow descent. Unfortunately, this one had been in too much of a hurry.

One of the boys had a twisted arm, mirroring the warped vulture's wing.

I'd heard on the streets that a beggar king, who bought bastards off of whores, had disarticulated the elbow joint to increase his begging value. Father Antony dismissed such allegations as "rumor and false report," describing the beggar king as "a luckless mendicant." He referred to the street boys and girls, not as "lice" and "vermin," but as "Children of the Gods" since so few of us knew who our fathers were. Conceived through rape or a whore's dissembled lust, we were despised by all save the gods.

The nobles however, loathed us, and in the end they held sway. The magistrate hanged that "luckless mendicant," in the plaza, one day. Dismembered into fourths, his body parts were currently gibbeted above the city gate.

However disputed his paternity, the crippled street rat was now impaling the vulture's groin with a fishing spear. I yanked it out of his hand.

"Try that again," I said, shaking it in his face, "and I'll bury this in your ass."

The boys -younger and smaller than myself- instantly cowered. Such was life on the streets. Might made right. We routinely wake up to find our companions dead in the street, raped bloody, or in a transit jail.

I was, of course, better off than most. I had dirty straw to sleep on and poor house rations to eat. Furthermore, the septon, at personal peril, had educated me. Through the father, and his books, I knew other worlds than the inferno of my existence.


	3. Chapter 3

Some strange feeling rose inside of me. An awareness crept up to me. My breathing sped up and I felt the blood rush through my body.

I watched the flesh-traders haul away the caged men to their fate. I watched the tethered bird flop circles on the ground. I knew...

I was being watched.

In a stately carriage of burnished oak and cedar, plush velvet and rich leather, gleaming fittings and magnificent dray horses, less than fifty paces away an old woman studied my every move. Haughtily aristocratic, she was accoutered in black silk, festooned with pearls, gold and gemstones. A purple sigil of a falling star and white sword graced the carriage door. She was thin as a reed-little more than parchment and bones-and all her money would never resurrect the blush of youth.

She was no doubt the doyen head of some great house, grown old and mean and murderous. She reminded me of some old raptor on the hunt, with talons arched, eyes ravenous, belly growling.

Father Antony was entering the plaza, and she turned to study him.

Bald, slope-shouldered, he was a man with troubled features. He not only worshiped the seven, he burdened himself with them. He absorbed the pain of others and carried it bleeding in his heart. To the urchins who lived in the streets, he was the Mother's Mercy in mortal form, his small, wooden shack in the slums providing the only shelter and sustenance many of us would ever know.

Some say that Father Antony fell from grace through his ample sampling of the sacramental wine. Others said he had a weakness for easy women. But in the end, I believe, his insistence upon ministering to all equally, including peasants and outcasts, was his sin.

The father had seen the old woman staring at me and apparently did not like what he saw. He hurried to the carriage, his gray rope flapping, his sandals trailing dust.

A commotion to my right diverted my attention. The thief was cut free from the flogging post. He slid groaning to the ground. His ribs and backbone still glistened ivory white. The man who'd flogged him was cleaning his whip in a bucket of brine. Removing the whip, he shook it out, cracking it four or five times.

He then poured the bloody brine over the prisoner's raw back. The thief howled like a pain-crazed dog, gone mad with feral suffering. Guards then hauled him to a nearby prison wagon.

I turned back and the father was standing next to the carriage. Both he and the matron stared at me. Father Antony shook his head, denying something. Perhaps she thought I'd stolen something. I quickly glanced at the caged prisoners. Did the magistrate send young boys to the mines? I suspected he did.

My fear quickly turned to anger. I had stolen nothing from the old bitch. It was true that I could not remember everything I had stolen I had stolen on the streets. Life was hard, and you did what you could to survive. This cheerless hag with her raptor eyes was no one I would rob.

Suddenly the father was rushing for me in his alarmed shuffle, his eyes fearful. Slipping his supping knife from under his robes, he jabbed his thumb.

Holy Mother, Goddess of Mercy!

I wanted to howl like the thief I'd just seen flogged. Had this rich lady stolen the man's wits?

He gathered me against his musty robes. "Speak only Dornish," he whispered hoarsely. The wine on his breath was as rank as his rotting robes.

He jabbed his bleeding thumb against my face, each time leaving a small bloody mark. "What the-"

"Don't touch them!" His voice was harried as his features. He pulled my straw hat down to cover more of my face, and then grabbed me by the neck and rushed me to the old women. I stumbled along with him, still clutching the fishing spear I'd taken off the guttersnipe.

"As I told you, My Lady, it's not him; just another street urchin. See, he's sick with the pox!" He said as he pushed the hat off my head, exposing the red blotches on my face.

The old woman drew back in horror. "Go!" She barked to her driver. She slammed the window shutter as the driver whipped the horses.

As the coach rumbled across the cobblestones, a wheeze of relief escaped the father. He mumbled thanks to the gods and drew the sept pointed star across his chest.

"What is it, Father? Why did you make me look like a plague carrier?" I rubbed my face with both my hands.

"It's a trick of the silent sisters, used to keep them from being raped when their convents are attacked." Still in the grip of fright, He gripped his seven point star beaded necklace, leaving bloody marks on the beads.

Gawking at the father, I started to speak. He waved away my questions. "Do not ask what I cannot answer. Just remember, if a noble questions you, answer in Dornish and never admit to having Valyrian blood."

My protests by a disturbance behind me.

The vulture I'd protected gave a sharp squawk at a laughing street boy prodding it with a stick. The boy drove the stick deep into the bird's chest.

/

All I knew in those days were the streets of Oldtown and the father's books. Not that I lacked cleverness or curiosity. As a beggar, my conniving was notorious. While many a street leper begged those rough and tumble streets, none did so as ingeniously as I.

This day, a year later, I served my vigil in the doorway of a closed shop two streets up from the docks and it should have been a lucrative perch. The Qarthi treasure fleet was arriving and spectators on their way to the harbor passed in the hundreds. Ships, laden with the goods of the far east, were anchoring to unload and refill their holds with treasures of every kind.

The lower city was continually in shambles. Its buildings were thrown together with wood, mud brick, and crude whitewash. They were in constant disrepair. Frequently flattened by fierce ocean storms, routinely razed by fires, our city was forever rebuilding itself like the phoenix.

Still, the fleet arrived each year, escorted by numerous warships, and this year, the fleet's arrival was even more dramatic. Coinciding with the arrival of the Qarthi fleet, was the arrival of the newly appointed Arch-Septon of the Starry Sept.

Hundreds of clergy crowded the streets. The streets teemed with their sacred orders, in their rough spun robes of gray and black, for the most part. The Smiths stood with their sacred hammers in hand. The Father's with their books of justice and scripture in hand. They shared the streets with an army of merchants who had come to claim their goods and transport them.

There would be the great annual fair, a couple days to the south, where the air was fresh and nonpoisonous to the nose. Halapa was a tourney village where fairs and tourneys were help almost constantly for some cause or another. The treasure fleet's fair was the grandest of them all, I'd heard.

Nonetheless, pleading for alms was no easy matter. Not even with the Qarthi treasure fleet arriving. The streets were packed, the people distracted. A portly merchant with his equally prodigious wife treaded their way through the crowd. Expensively attired, they radiated riches. Lepers on all sides whined for handouts, but were ruthlessly spurned.

Still I was nothing if not resourceful. An ancient eastman of Yi-Ti- taken ill in our hospice- had taught me the art of contortionism, in which I soon excelled. By relaxing each joint, I could dislocate my elbows, knees, and shoulders, and contort my limbs into positions the gods never imagined. I quickly turned myself into a monster.

As the merchant and his wife came abreast of my doorway, I crawled out of it and whimpered. They both gasped. As they hurried around me, I brushed up against the woman's dress and sobbed my alms cry: " Alms for the poor disfigured orphan!"

She almost jumped out of her skin.

"Give him money," the woman shouted at her husband. The man threw a copper coin at me. It missed the woven basket, strung from my neck, and hit me in my right eye. I grabbed the coin with my one uncontorted hand before one of the other urchins sprang on it like a starving snake.

I quickly realigned my limbs.

Should I have been ashamed of my life? Perhaps. But it was all I could do. Father Antony did his best for me, but his best was a bed of straw behind a rotted reed curtain in the corner of a dirt-floored hovel. Beyond that hovel lay no future at all. A street leper, by definition, lived by his wits. By begging, lying, stealing, scheming, and plotting.

"Whoa!" A shove suddenly sent me sprawling in the street.

A swaggering swordsman with a stunningly beautiful dark skinned girl on his arm, stepped over me without even looking down. To him, I was less than a dog. He was a wearer of spurs, and I was something to rowel. Yet even at my tender age, I was more enthralled by his exotic, erotic woman than his sword and swagger. She was doubtlessly the offspring of some westrosi father and summer islander mother. Her father, most likely a pimp, and her mother, his chattel.

"Ah, we men love the tawny ladies," the father once said to me while in the grip of wine, and it seemed to be the case. She too stepped over my sprawling remains, swinging her insolent hips like they were a gold mine, her flamboyant dress flouncing, her perfumed breast bouncing, her thick, red-tinted hair flung casually over one shoulder. Glancing over her shoulder, she allowed me a cruel, cooked grin.

I could not help but admire her appeal. Her waistcoat fitted her like a bodice, girdled with pearls and knots of gold, her skirts laced with vermilion and trimmed with gold thread. Her sleeves were broad and open at the end, draped with silvery silk. But her tawny breasts were what drew me.

Covered only by by long twisted coils of red streaked hair, into which gold and silver thread thread had been meticulously woven, her dark nipples darted artfully out of their hiding places, peeked briefly to the surrounding world, then discreetly receded from view.

In these areas of the city, whores were given freer reign than noble women. Any lady daring to expose herself in such a way would be horsewhipped. Whores like this were property though, not people.

"My brothers in the sept," the father told me once, "bemoan the fact that so many men prefer the company of whores to that of their wives. But many times I have seen these low women visit them through the sept's back door."

Still, I resented the way the swordsman pushed me aside. Street lepers were lower than curs, but I resented even more, because of my education. I not only wrote and spoke the common Andal language, I knew Dornish too. I was proficient- no I excelled at both High and Low Valyrian. I had read the classics in three languages, and on the waterfront had picked up smatterings of other tongues.

Of course the father forbid me from revealing any of these learnings.

"Never reveal your education," he warned me during every lesson. "The Crone's Men would never believe a leper literate, without demonic complicity, and they will re-instruct you according to their lights- and those who pass lettering to peasants. Believe me, theirs are lessons neither of us wish to learn. I know. So never flaunt your learning, unless you wish to while away your years in the Crone's dungeons. Unless you prefer to stretch your limbs on their straps, whips, and racks."

They father's warning became as much a part of my lessons as amo, amas, amat, amamus, amatis, amant.

A young Valyrian girl in a green flowing gown laced with white silk silk came out of a nearby goldsmith's shop. I crossed the wharf to intercept her, preparing to do my crippled dog act for her. Until I saw her face. Her eyes stopped me dead in my tracks. I was no longer able to writhe on my hands and knees and play the fool than I could make the sun stand still.

She had bright, violet eyes. Her face had the soft pale of great and powerful ladies whose complexions never suffer from the sun. Her hair was long, glowing white, cascading over her shoulders in luxurious waves. She was but a girl, a year or two younger than my fifteen, but she carried herself with regal bearing. In a few years, knights would die on swords for her favor.

Men treated well-born ladies with gallantry, and when a puddle of early morning rain blocked her path, I, too, felt called upon to play the chivalric fool. Undoing my manta, the only blanked I had, I wore slung over my right shoulder and under my left arm, I rushed to her.

"My lady, Sir Barriston Selmy, The Bold, salutes you."

The girl's eyes widened as I rushed over to her. I flung my tattered blanket like a cape over the puddle. Bowing deeply, I gestured for her to step on the blanket. She stood rooted like a tree, her cheeks flushing, At first, I thought she was going to order me out of he sight. Then, I realized, she was fighting back a smile.

A youth came out of the goldsmith's behind her, a boy a year or two younger than I. He was already as tall as me and more muscular. He was darker in complexion, his features pocked, and he seemed in a dark mood. He had apparently been out riding, because he was wearing gray riding breeches, a purple, sleeveless doublet over a matching linen shirt, knee-high, ebony riding boots with wickedly sharp rowels, and he carried a horsewhip.

When the crop struck my right cheek, I was caught flat footed. "Get out of here, you filthy street swine."

Rocked on my heels, anger overwhelmed me. If I hit him, I would be lashed to the whipping post, flogged senseless, then sent to die in an iron mine. There was no greater offense than to attack a noble. I did not care. When he raised the whip a second time, I clenched my fists and started toward him.

She stepped between us. "Stop it. Leave him alone."

She swung back around to me. Taking a coin from her pocket, she handed it to me. "Take this. Go."

Grabbing my blanket from the muddy water, I flung the coin in the puddle and walked away.

Pride goeth before before a fall; and like a woman's smile, pride would return to haunt me.


End file.
